Ellen Ripley – The Alien Franchise (1979 – 1997)
Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, is the central character in the Alien film franchise, created by Ridley Scott in 1979 from a script by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett. As such, Ripley entered the annals of history in 1986 when Weaver earned her first Oscar nomination for playing the character – which was the first in the science fiction genre to be recognized by the Academy. Ripley is widely regarded as being one of the most well-written female characters in cinema, because she is, in effect, one of the most realistic ever created.
Ripley is first introduced in Alien as a crew member of the Nostromo – a ship travelling from the planet Thedus, back to Earth. Though they are in stasis, the crew is awakened by the ship to investigate a distress call from a nearby planet, and in doing so, first encounters the Alien. The deadly creature infiltrates their ship in gruesome fashion, laying waste to the entire crew – except for Ripley.
The following three films see the character plunged into stasis again and again, resulting in her outliving her own daughter and continually finding herself onboard ships infiltrated by Alien creatures, despite her best efforts to destroy them. In her struggles with the creatures, she rescues a child and a Colonial Marine (only for them to be killed later), crashes onto an all-male penal colony, and sacrifices herself to destroy the creature – in order to prevent a nefarious corporation from weaponizing it.
Finally, 200 years later, we learn that Ripley has been cloned in such a way that her DNA has merged with the very Alien creature she spent centuries trying to destroy. The result of that cloning is also the birth of a human-Alien hybrid, by an Alien Queen, which is then killed by its offspring, which in turn recognizes the Ripley clone as its mother. Despite a sense of maternal connection with the creature, Ripley kills it and returns to a ruined Earth.
As Ripley experiences trauma after trauma, her character evolves organically. Throughout the franchise, however, she retains the qualities that made her a stand-out character in the first place – chief among which is that she is simply a crew member doing her job. She is not a love interest, she is not objectified, and she does not exist to improve the situation of those around her. She gets angry and frustrated, she is insistent and rude, and she does what she needs to do to get the job done. She is a human being trying to survive a deadly circumstance, who saves those she can save, and mourns those she can’t. Ellen Ripley is a brilliantly written female film character.